Caitlin R. Kiernan won the best novel award at the Bram Stoker Awards for The Drowning Girl. The Horror Writers Association revealed the winners at a gala this weekend.

Below, we’ve rounded up free samples of the scariest books of the year–did your favorite horror novel make the cut?

All the winners are listed in bold.

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Timebound by Rysa Walker has won the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The YA novelist won a $50,000 advance and a publishing contract with Amazon Children’s Publishing’s Skyscape imprint.

Readers voted for the grandprize winner, picking Cary, North Carolina author as the winner of the sixth annual competition. Here’s more from the release:

Walker’s Timebound was inspired by her love of history and science fiction and explores how the choices we make affect our future. In the novel, 17-year-old Kate learns that she’s inherited a genetic license to time travel when her grandmother shares a strange blue medallion, an even stranger tale about future historians, and the unshakeable conviction that the fate of half the planet lies in Kate’s hands.

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The paperback edition of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson comes out on September 10, 2013 with a brand new cover.

We’ve embedded the cover image above, with a Norman Seeff photograph from 1984. What do you think?

Does inspiration strike when you are bored? I remember making up intricate stories as a kid trapped at long school assemblies or endless services.

Neil Gaiman shared a key writing tip at The Guardian last week: “the best way to come up with new ideas is to get really bored.” The novelist has decided to take a break from social media to seek more of this personal time. Check it out:

Watching school plays was ideal, he continued. ”You have to sit there for hours and you can’t read or use a phone or check something on the web. I’ll come out afterwards thinking: ‘Did I just plot out an episode of Dr Who there? I think I did.’ “

German author Oliver Potzsch has sold more than a million copies of the books in his crime series that began with The Hangman’s Daughter. The series has been published by Amazon Publishing.

AppNewser has more details about the sales:

This includes the combined worldwide sales of print, audio and eBook editions of his three books: The Hangman’s Daughter, The Dark Monk, and The Beggar King. The news comes as the author is readying to release his fourth book in the series, The Poisoned Pilgrim, which comes out on July 16th.

In this encore edition of the Morning Media Menu, we spoke with Dan Slater, author of Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating.

Slater explained how he went from losing his job to writing a book about dating in the age of social networks. He also shared some practical intelligence for making the best nonfiction book proposal. Here is an excerpt:

I had been a legal reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and I never in a million years imagined myself writing an article, much less a book, about online dating. I stumbled on to it. I thought the subject was interesting, both the business side and the sociological side–’How is this business affecting people?’ … Then you look at the market: ‘Has this book been done?’ That is something that you can see quite easily. You go on Amazon and do a bunch of searches. You say, ‘Okay, what does this space look like?’

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The violent trailer for 300: Rise of an Empire has been released, an adaptation of Frank Miller‘s as-yet-unreleased graphic novel, Xerxes.

We’ve embedded the trailer above–what do you think. The film comes out next March, a follow-up to 300 film and graphic novel. Miller described the graphic novel in an interview:

The time frame begins 10 years before ’300′ and the story starts with the Battle of Marathon, which was killer to draw, by the way, even if it was a lot of work. The lead character is Themistocles, who became warlord of Greece and built their navy. The story is very different than ’300′ in that it involves Xerxes’ search for godhood. The existence of gods are presupposed in this story and the idea is that he [is] well on his way to godhood by the end of the story.

Pirated copies of Stephen King‘s print-only Joyland are already circulating online.

If you think book piracy is hurting your book sales, you can confront pirates online by using the tools listed in our Five Ways To Fight Book Pirates post at AppNewser.

At the same time, a few GalleyCat readers suggested that authors engage with pirates instead of taking legal action…

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Institute of Museum and Library Services statistician Justin Grimes mapped all 17,000 public libraries in the United States, revealing the reach of our library system. Atlantic Cities has the scoop:

If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the ubiquity of McDonald’s, this stat may make your day: There are more public libraries (about 17,000) in America than outposts of the burger mega-chain (about 14,000). The same is true of Starbucks (about 11,000 coffee shops nationally).

Follow this link to see the complete Google Map Grimes created.

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The Oxford English Dictionary has added ‘tweet’ and ‘crowdsourcing’ to its famous lexicon.

OED chief editor John Simpson wrote an article about the newly added words. The verb “crowdsourcing” has been attributed to Jeff Howe and his famous Wired magazine article about the topic. Here’s more from Simpson:

Some notes on the new vocabulary in this batch come from a wide range of semantic regions, as usual. Scientific vocabulary (especially technology) forms a healthy chunk: big data, crowdsourcing, e-reader, mouseover, redirect (the noun), and stream (the verb) … The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on.

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